The blog's stupendous success—43 million visits in 2016 and approaching 50 million for this year—can be credited to useful content, careful use of data and a smart
overall strategy.

Health Essentials is produced by a full-time team of 25 that also designs and produces all on- and offline content for the enterprise (there is also a
half-time designer). Among them are three project managers, two print-production team members, eight editors and writers and six designers.

Some tips from Health Essentials:

1. Build relationships.

Cleveland Clinic is a $6.2 billion enterprise stretching from the Ohio city to locations in Abu Dhabi, Canada, Florida, Las Vegas and London, England. The
clinic employs 49,000 people (all are considered "caregivers"), including 3,400 full-time salaried physicians and researchers and 14,000 nurses. Patients
come for treatment from every state and 180 countries.

But health care is different from other forms of marketing. The clinic can't offer a coupon that will cause throngs of people to line up to have their
appendixes removed. Marketing the clinic is all about brand awareness, and that means becoming a place people trust for advice about health and wellness in
general.

"When you hit these three things, every single metric goes up," Todorovich says. "Traffic goes up. Organic reach on social media goes up. Your engagement
across the board goes up."

For this reason, Health Essentials avoids the approach many hospitals take, of telling patient stories that pull at your heartstrings. Often in such cases,
she says, marketing concerns override what is useful to readers, so there's a push to add mentions of every department or outpatient clinic involved in the
treatment.

"Patient stories have a tendency to become like a bad infomercial for a hospital really quickly," she says, "because you're never going to put out a bad
patient story. There's always a positive outcome."

3. Use data to vary your timing.

When Health Essentials publishes a blog post at 9 a.m., staffers don't promote it on every social media channel at that moment. Rather, they use data to
determine the right moment. A mom's social media activities will be different when checking her smartphone before cooking breakfast as opposed to meeting
her friends for a glass of wine on a Friday night.

"We know people use different channels different ways at different times of day," Todorovich says. "Our demographics are of the users are different. The
ways they engage with content are different. The formats of content they engage with are different."

Tweak and test post lengths and use your metrics to see what works.

4. Use data to get executive support.

Put your data to work to engage stakeholders and get executive support, Todorovich says. The Health Essentials team meets with each clinical team once a
month to find out what's going on and what doctors and patients are talking about.

Todorovich's team says, "OK, last month we published these posts that were really good to your service line. Here's the traffic, and here's what happened,
and here's how many clicks these ones got."

They can discuss what worked and what didn't, so staffers don't spend time on things that "don't get us the engagement," she says.

The data can help convince clinical marketing areas that might like to have a story on a rare condition that few people experience or care about.
Confronted with the data, they usually conclude, "Maybe this isn't the right channel for my messages."

That helps prevent people in other departments from thinking of Health Essentials as a dumping ground for any old content.

Health Essentials can track how many epilepsy patients came through the blog to the clinic because of the links placed within articles. But that's not the
primary goal of the blog.

"Our goal is brand awareness. ... I care about our reach. I care about our brand awareness reports that come out quarterly. I care about the impact we're
having nationally."